Tag: politics

I recently came across a Vietnamese film, The Floating Lives (Canh Dong Bat Tan), which was released in 2010 by Nguyen Phan Quang Binh. Although this film is a few years old, the issues that the director addresses still feel fresh and progressive from my perspective as an Indonesian woman who teaches courses on women, gender, sexuality and religion. The plot follows the life of man referred to as Mr. Vo, a severely broken-hearted man whose wife has left him for reasons the film does not reveal. Fate has left him a single parent and a duck farmer. By the … Continue reading The Price of Peace: A Review of Nguyen Phan Quang Binh’s ‘The Floating Lives’ by Tini Ngatini

“Who runs the world?” I ask because I have complaints. The little man tells me the box for such things is down the hall. I stumble, clutching my manifestos. If only the masses would read these typed blueprints for utopia then the world would work, because I am a mechanic for reality! I get to the box, but it is closed. The sign reads— UNDER CONSTRUCTION. SEE WEBSITE FOR DETAILS. So, I tweet. I post. I comment and I yelp. I set my phone to vibrate text alert so if anyone comments their digital voice will trip the … Continue reading Manifestos: A Prose Poem by Wes Bishop

And in that republic, they built a machine, a machine of a million names, but one purpose, cruelty. Inflicting pain was a virtue of nettles on bare skin, leaving kindness’s soothing balm treason. It is why I stopped searching this world for guidance, instead pilgriming to myself to find the capitol of compassion. But the old men raged. Respect was a price they could not afford and even if they paid their dues nothing would change, they claimed. So, we were told to accept the world they had birthed. In aborted flooded canals we swam, slow swarms watching … Continue reading And In That Republic by Wes Bishop

They insert their hands in my mouth, these passerby pedestrians in the in-between electric places that simultaneously exist but do not exist, (much like a deceased living cat in a physics experiment), and with errant fingers feel my tongue reading my words like braille chiseled on electric, hovering boards of keys. These strangers, bathed in blue white light, wade next to me in pools of infinite connectivity. And they like me, and they share me, and they give me plenitudes of hearts, thumbs, and winking yellow faces, never before seen in other realms but the face of us … Continue reading Cyber Pamphleteer: Imagined Stations, A Poem by Wes Bishop

When I was a young child, I would lay awake at night and travel. I had read one of those late 80s magazines about everything supernatural and, along with a young adult novel whose title I forgot long ago, I was summarily convinced that I should, at the very least, give astral projection a try. This is not a piece about how astral projection works. What I discovered then, though, was that if I focused enough during the day–many religions and practices call it mindfulness or extended concentration–I could recreate my environs before falling asleep every night. I could recreate … Continue reading On Dreaming Escape by Michelle M. Campbell

Collective intelligence currently exists in the form of mobile devices, search engines, democratized content, and social media. A move from this current state to one where we are connected via implant would represent a dramatic shift in human condition, a grand unification into one unimaginably powerful cybernetic creature. This affects aesthetics in the medical sense. Would an implant network act like a sixth sense or utilize the usual five? Would these implants create a new connection between our mind and the outside world, or simply augment what we are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling? I’ll pause here to acknowledge … Continue reading Horror Paradise by Adam MacHose